Michele Mottini, head of research and development at Tera Digital Publishing, talks about the company’s newspaper portfolio.

Mottini Head of Research and Development, Tera Digital Publishing

What is Tera’s main focus moving forward?

Our focus is content, content, content. We have always been developing editorial systems and content management, and we feel it is something that’s becoming even more important moving toward the future.

We are building on the experience that we’ve gathered to offer better handling for content and a more centralized handling for content.

 

How are Tera’s products changing with the move towards multimedia?

We are doing the same things we were doing, but what is changing is the nature of content. When we started, content was text with some pictures. Over time, it became more text and different formats of text, more pictures. Now it’s increasingly multimedia and user-generated content and also structured content — listings and sports results.

So, what we’re doing is still the same,  but we are targeting the broadening definition of content with our new generation of products.

What trends do you see emerging in the newspaper industry and how do Tera and its products fit into those trends – both in the U.S. and globally?

We are seeing the Web becoming increasingly important. There was a period in 1999-2000 where everything seemed to be becoming Web-oriented but at that time it wasn’t really for real. If you spoke to a newspaper they were starting to ask for Web applications, but when you went into the details they were actually interested only in printed production.

In the last couple of years, the Web has become really important. When you are talking to newspapers in detail you are talking not just about print, but also Web, repurposing, syndication and other ways to generate revenue from their content.

Another trend we are seeing is free newspapers, especially in Europe, but I think it’s starting to be important in the U.S. as well. We have some customers reaching from paid weeklies to free weeklies here in the U.S. and we have some customers in Italy and Europe that are big free newspapers.

In terms of fitting into these trends, our focus is on content and the things we are developing to handle media-neutral content — video, multimedia, structured content — our tools help newspapers to produce multimedia product, to use syndication, to generate feeds, to handle user-generated content.

For free newspapers and free weeklies we have a tool that is very efficient in terms of producing pages. For customers who are producing a lot of pages — which is something that you must do if you are producing free newspaper — you must have an efficient way to produce a lot of pages, and share content between different regional editions.

What advice would you give to newspapers looking to implement tools to manage multimedia content — from print to Web to mobile?

Newspapers should look for integration (in any product they are considering).

Also, stop trying to be software developers. We see newspapers that are developing their own applications and spending quite a lot of resources. Newspapers sometimes think they can get open-source software and build their own product, but the problem is that then you have to maintain it.